Empire Mining Buys Exploration License for Povlen Project

Empire Mining Corporation (TSX VENTURE:EPC) has announced that it has acquired an exploration licence over a series of partially-explored copper-cobalt-zinc deposits in an historical VMS district in Serbia. The 90 km² Povlen Project licence lies some 130 km SSW of Belgrade in an area with good infrastructure.

The licence covers several copper deposits and numerous occurrences and prospects along approx. the principal two-thirds of a 30 km northwest-southeast trend hosted by a Jurassic chert-diabase formation. The licence area has a long history of mining activity dating from Roman and Medieval times to the early-mid twentieth century. Detailed exploration was carried out on the licence area by the state, principally in the 1970's, when more than 100 copper outcrops and occurrences were found and explored by geochemistry and very limited drilling. A large number of copper and other metals anomalies were delineated, however due to a lack of state funding, no new exploration has been undertaken since.

Copper is the dominant metal in the sampling and cobalt is anomalous at both the Rebelj and Recica Deposits. While it is too early to draw any conclusions from the geochemistry, the copper-cobalt-zinc association is characteristic of some ophiolite-hosted deposits like the well-known Outokumpu orebodies in Finland, which display compositional variations.

Mineralisation types described by Serbian geologists include: massive pyrite-chalcopyrite (Rebelj, Recica Deposits), massive pyrite-magnetite-chalcopyrite (Novakovaca Deposit), and stockwork/disseminated pyrite-chalcopyrite (Lajkovaca Deposit).